The National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematical Sciences has awarded more than $500,000 to Penn State to develop new statistical methods needed for predicting the future of Antarctic ice sheets.

The 2017 Bioinformatics and Genomics retreat will be held on September 22nd and 23rd. The one and a half day retreat will feature Dr. Zhiping Weng from University of Massachusetts Medical School as the keynote speaker. There will also be a number of faculty and student talks as well as a workshop session on the September 23rd. The retreat is open to everyone and attendance is free, but everyone must register before September 15th.

SAMSI is poised to help astronomers hone their new sense. In November 2014, SAMSI sought input from the astronomical community for a year-long program that would gather astronomers, statisticians, and applied mathematicians to address challenging interdisciplinary problems in astronomy. Led by statistician G. Jogesh Babu (Penn. State University), a team of scientists identified a set of timely and compelling research directions, under the overarching and overlapping themes of time-domain astronomy and survey-based astronomy.

This summer "Nature Methods" launched a new column ‘Points of Significance’ devoted to statistics, a topic of profound importance for biological research, but one that often doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.